The number of trips taken by Namibians to local hospitality establishments continued to drop further in August 2022, from 17.9% in July 2022 to 15.7%, amid an increase in foreign arrivals.
According to Simonis Storm, the bulk of guests at local hospitality establishments came from Germany, Switzerland and Austria (34.4%), France (11.8%), Italy (8.9%), Benelux (6.1%) and South Africa (4.9%).
Namibia is one of five Southern African countries that improved its visa openness measure the most during the 2016 to 2021 period, according to the 2021 Africa Visa Openness Report.
The country is now ranked 19th in terms of visa openness (compared to 38 in 2016), where the first is “most open”.
Benin, Gambia and Seychelles offered visa-free access to all African visitors in 2021 and 2020. During 2021, 72% of African countries could visit Namibia visa-free.
The main contributor for the improved rankings is Namibia’s new visa-on-arrival policy for the nationals of 47 countries worldwide, which includes 27 African countries.
Simonis Storm noted that a national occupancy rate of 61.3% was recorded during August 2022, compared to 51.0% in the prior month and 20.7% in August 2021 according to the Hospitality Association of Namibia (HAN).
YTD, the national occupancy rate averages 36.2%, compared to 20.2% for the same period in 2021 (January to August), showing an improvement in tourist inflows.
In maintaining this momentum and keeping occupancy levels afloat, Namibia will have to address issues around the availability of rental vehicles and flight access.
The Hospitality Association of Namibia (HAN) has received reports of potential travellers who cancelled or postponed their visit to Namibia due to rental car shortages and limited availability on flights.
“This signals that tourist demand for Namibia remains high and provides the country with an opportunity to stimulate economic activity,” said HAN.
Regarding the purpose of travel into Namibia, 95.3% came for leisure, 2.7% for business and 2% for conferences.
Hospitality establishments in the northern area recorded the highest occupancy rate (67.9%), followed by the central area (60.5%), southern area (57.2%) and coastal area (56.2%) in August 2022.
YTD, Namibian airports average 12 044 international arrivals per month, compared to a monthly average of 3 840 a rise of 213.7% for the same period last year (January to August). July 2022 recorded the highest number of foreign arrivals since October 2019.
Analysts believe that the removal of COVID-19-related restrictions bodes well for tourist inflows in coming months.
Improved international, regional and domestic arrivals at nationwide airports can support economic activity for the air travel component of the transport sector.
In addition, tourism has a wide value chain, benefiting SMEs and employment in rural areas, as well as other industries such as professional services (e.g. forex and travel agents) and retail.
